Ripping people off with faulty products made from cheap, substandard components results leads to financial loss?

On more than one occasion I've seen Dell laptops completely shiat the bed because some $0.05 component melted, or a design flaw in the adapter caused it to fry both the adapter and part or all of the BIOS within a month (a VERY common problem that Dell blatantly refuses to recognize), or the motherboard simply falls apart due to shiatty solder or a poorly designed cooling system (if they put all the air vents on the bottom of the thing, of course the CPU will idle at >80 C, that doesn't mean it's "normal"). More often than not this requires hundreds of dollars of repairs. You'd send your laptop away, only for it to come back with a faulty replacement motherboard/GPU/whatever that causes the same ridiculous problems all over again.

It's like Dell designs many of their low end products to be broken pieces of shiat on purpose so you'll spend more money. They think they can get away with it because computers aren't cars and nobody gets hurt.

My wife owns a Dell that is about 2 years old. It's actually a higher end model, XPS line, maybe? Anyhow, shortly after it was purchased, it started giving the occasional bsd for no apparent reason, and the touchpad would flake out after about 10 minutes of use. So I opened the thing up, cleaned it out, checked all the software and drivers, but everything seemed normal. Well, after I put it back together I realized all the cooling vents on the damn thing are on the bottom of the case, right in the center - not even close to an edge where they might stand a chance of moving some air in/out. So, I turned the thing on and ran prime95 for a bit, and put my hand over the middle of the keyboard, and sure enough you could probably make toast on top of that thing (it is a core i7). Simple solution- purchased laptop cooler with giant fan, tada! All fixed. Sorry for the csb, but the point is, Dell's designs, even for higher end stuff, appear to fundamentally flawed. This $2k laptop shouldn't require an additional cooler to function properly. No more Dells for our household.

swaxhog:Compute power for the masses plateaued several years ago. You don't need to get a new Dell every year any more. Instead that money is spent buying a new phone or tablet every year.

I wanted to upgrade the video card on my last Dell, but I realized the power supply was so inadequate for any possible upgrade. So I said OK let me buy the video card and the power supply, but then I found out that due to how the Dell was built, I'd have to get a whole new motherboard in order to get the new power supply to power the new video card I wanted. So I said screw it, bought a new PC and never messed with Dell again.

dervish16108:I wanted to upgrade the video card on my last Dell, but I realized the power supply was so inadequate for any possible upgrade. So I said OK let me buy the video card and the power supply, but then I found out that due to how the Dell was built, I'd have to get a whole new motherboard in order to get the new power supply to power the new video card I wanted. So I said screw it, bought a new PC and never messed with Dell again.

Dell makes (or used to make) decent machines - not for 'enthusiasts' though. They have always, always, always put in the tiniest power supply they can get away with.

I have an XPS from about 3 years ago. It's an i7 940 (4 core, 8 threads, 2.9GHz). Got it with 12GB RAM. The monitor is 2560x1440. Those specs still hold up today. 10-15 years ago, there was dramatic jumps every 6 months. Other than swapping out for a SSD a year ago its cost me nothing. It still plays everything I've tried and I feel its done me good.